Tabletop Storyboarding for Live Film Production
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Newcastle University e-prints Date deposited: 24th May 2012 Version of file: Author pre-print Peer Review Status: Peer reviewed Citation for item: Bartindale T, Sheikh A, Taylor N, Wright P, Olivier P. StoryCrate: Tabletop Storyboarding for Live Film Production. In: CHI '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. Further information on publisher website: http://www.acm.org/ Publisher’s copyright statement: © 2012 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in CHI '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2012 at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207700 Always use the definitive version when citing. 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Tel. 0191 222 6000 StoryCrate: Tabletop Storyboarding for Live Film Production Tom Bartindale1, Alia Sheikh2, Nick Taylor1, Peter Wright1, Patrick Olivier1 1 Culture Lab 2 BBC Research & Development School of Computing Science Centre House, Newcastle University, UK 56 Wood Lane, {t.l.bartindale,nick.taylor,p.c.wright, London, UK p.l.olivier}@ncl.ac.uk [email protected] ABSTRACT Creating film content for broadcast is a high pressure and complex activity involving multiple experts and highly specialized equipment. Production teams are under continuous pressure to produce ever more creative and groundbreaking content while reducing the budgets and human resources required. While technologies are being developed for digitizing and streamlining sections of the production workflow, a gap remains between creative decisions made on location, and those made during digital editing and post-production. We describe a prototype tangible, tabletop interface to be deployed on a film shoot, which uses a storyboard as a shared data representation to drive team creativity. We define creativity in terms of team production, discuss our implementation and describe a deployment in which the prototype was used by a professional production team during a film shoot. Finally we describe a number of interesting interactions that were observed and consider the implications of our design decisions on the creative process of film making and the benefits of tangible, tabletop collaborative interactive displays in live film production. Figure 1. StoryCrate Prototype. technologies relating to teletext, video on demand services AUTHOR KEYWORDS Broadcast; tangible interface; collaborative work; inter- and digital television standards to enhance users’ viewing disciplinary; prototype, storyboarding; editing. experience. Recently BBC has developed a set of digital workflow tools to improve efficiency in the production ACM Classification Keywords process. This paper describes a collaboration between H.5.3 [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: interaction design researchers and BBC Research and Group and Organization Interfaces - Collaborative Development which aimed to integrate the media computing. production process and its multiple technological INTRODUCTION components, bridging in-house digital production workflow Producing media content for broadcast is a time consuming products and new interaction techniques and technologies and expensive process involving a large number of skilled to drive existing production staff to produce better content. and experienced staff. BBC (British Broadcasting To enable our understanding of this domain we developed a Corporation) has for many years been at the cutting edge of technology prototype designed to facilitate collaborative broadcast technology research, developing innovative production in a broadcast scenario, which we deployed and evaluated during a professional film shoot. We present our Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for design rationale, the prototype implementation, and report personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are on our initial findings regarding the use of interactive not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies technologies to support the complex processes involved in bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior these types of broadcast production. Our contribution is specific permission and/or a fee. twofold: The design and deployment of a system to drive CHI’12, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. awareness and ownership in live production, towards Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1015-4/12/05...$10.00. understanding how collaborative design elements benefit highly creative yet specialized environments; editor and director in the editing phase), by moving creative Demonstrating that technology in a live context can be decision-making earlier in the workflow we can make better designed to facilitate creativity by using atomic use of the context in which the production team operate and functionality and graphical state representation. Rather than its proximity to the shoot, and use technology to transfer assume that design paradigms from other domains translate information about these decisions into post-shoot phases. directly to this domain, we present specific elements that Better support for creative decision-making earlier in the drive creative practice in an existing live production process, and better capture and communication of these workflow. decisions should reduce the time currently spent searching and interpreting notes for clips during the editing phase. MAKING TELEVISION Making broadcast television involves multiple skilled Because the director’s vision drives content creation, they personnel each with an expertise in a different aspect of the set the agenda for the shoot and make the principal creative production process. Many of these roles are highly reliant decisions during the filming process. They lead a team of on digital and other technologies and developments in specialist production staff, including lighting and sound camera optics, HD recording and cloud media storage are engineers, camera operators and a script supervisor, who having a significant impact on production practice. must all be given enough information to perform their Although production processes vary tremendously, ranging function effectively. Such teams are usually organized from blockbuster movie sets with hundreds of crew to within a hierarchical team structure, where the further away wildlife documentaries with three multi-skilled team in the hierarchy team members are from the director, the members, they typically share a common workflow pattern. less awareness they will have of the current progress, the This workflow consists of a number of stages in which creative rationale and the end result. In addition to this, separate groups of people contribute to the final product. A many decisions that are made during the shoot are not acted typical workflow, shown in Figure 2, follows a linear order: upon immediately, but are decisions that the director and (i) a concept is developed through a group creative process; editor will act upon later, during editing. (ii) this is written as a script; (iii) the director designs This workflow is implemented throughout the television camera angles through the script; (iv) this is translated into production industry, and generally performs well in cases a shoot order, the actual order in which shots will be filmed where the production team has a rigid and well defined on set; (v) the shoot order is followed by the crew on set, production process and a fixed script. However, it is less and annotated with metadata by hand e.g. “boom in shot” or appropriate for smaller, multi-skilled teams where there is “incorrect dialogue”; and (vi) the raw footage, metadata and an expectation of quicker throughput from scripting to script are passed to an editor, who works with the director broadcast. Our goal was to develop digital tools to support to produce a final edit for broadcast. creative decision-making and the production process of such smaller production teams. Our hypothesis is that by Create Develop Write Shoot on creating a shared, visible representation of the shoot phase Shoot Edit Broadcast Concept Script Location Order of production we can push the point at which a number of creative decisions are made earlier in the workflow. By Figure 2. The broadcast production workflow. having earlier decision-making, more members of the team can be involved and the number of decisions that have to be Systems such as INGEX [7] for tape-less recording, and made at edit time (using interpreted data) by director and Redux [26] (the technology behind BBC iPlayer) for editor will be reduced. By allowing crew members to have distribution, archiving and playlist creation, are innovations more awareness of the effect of their role on content that